Overview

Gunnery skills let you use Eve's three varieties of turret (projectile, hybrid and laser) and make those turrets more effective. These skills will be important for PvE and PvP combat unless your character is purely specialized in drones or missiles.

Perception and willpower will help you to master your guns.

The following are the skills in the Gunnery section (in alphabetical order):

The base skill, usually somewhere in the prerequisites of the other gunnery skills. The low training time multiplier and the useful rate of fire bonus would probably justify turret users training it to V even if it wasn't a prerequisite.

Controlled Bursts

Allows better control over the capacitor use of weapon turrets. 5% reduction in capacitor need of weapon turrets per skill level.

Having your turrets tracking as fast as possible is quite important; turret users should consider training this to IV to be an important short/medium-term goal, and in the long term it may be worth training it to V. Motion Prediction is also one of the prerequisite skills for T2 short-ranged turrets (autocannon, blasters and pulse lasers).

Rapid Firing

Skill at the rapid discharge of weapon turrets. 4% bonus per skill level to weapon turret rate of fire.

Optimal range is important for most turret users, and particularly important for sniper fits, though it's less significant for autocannon because they have very short optimal ranges. Minmatar pilots will still want to train this to help their artillery, though. Sharpshooter is one of the prerequisite skills for T2 long range turrets (railguns, beam lasers and artillery).

Surgical Strike

Knowledge of spaceships' structural weaknesses. 3% bonus per skill level to the damage of all weapon turrets.

More falloff is nice, but not as important as more optimal so most pilots can train this to III and then come back later to add on IV or V. However, Minmatar pilots may want to prioritise this skill since most of the range of autocannon is falloff.

Energy Turrets

Small Energy Turret

Operation of small energy turrets. 5% Bonus to small energy turret damage per level.